This invention relates to a method of printing sheets of photosensitive material with high efficiency by feeding a plurality of such sheets onto an exposure table at one time.
A roll of photosensitive material is printed simply by feeding it onto an exposure table in the form of a long web, or otherwise it is fed onto the exposure table for printing after cutting the web into a plurality of sheets.
In the former method, distances between the adjacent frames of printed images are sufficiently small so that printing efficiency is high. But when cutting the printed web into a plurality of prints, paper material between the adjacent frames has to be cut off and wasted by the width of about 3 mm. This is a cause of increased operating cost.
In the latter method, sheets cut from a long web of photosensitive material are fed onto an exposure table one at a time. After one sheet has been printed, another sheet is cut from the web and fed onto the exposure table for printing. Namely, it is impossible to cut a sheet from the web of photosensitive material while printing another sheet. Thus, compared with the former method, the latter method is low in printing efficiency.
Large prints such as panorama-size prints are gaining popularity these days. For such large-size printing, a large exposure table is needed. When printing photosensitive material in a roll form, the printing efficiency will not drop so markedly by using a large exposure table.
But in order to avoid the waste of paper, it is preferable to print photosensitive material after cutting it into a plurality of sheets. In this case, the larger the exposure table, the longer the processing time tends to be, because after printing one sheet, another sheet has to be cut and fed to the printing position.
But in this method, after printing, it is possible to feed the sheets into a developing unit in two or more rows. Thus, the sheets can be developed with high efficiency. No such parallel processing is possible with the method in which a web of photosensitive material is printed as it is.
An object of this invention is to provide a method of printing photosensitive material in which, in order to improve printing efficiency, a plurality of sheets of photosensitive material are fed not one at a time but at the same time if such plurality of sheets can be placed on an exposure table simultaneously.